page_title: HLH Orion
section_title: Operating system
hierarchical_section_title: HLH Orion / Operating system
caption_attribution_description: English: A bank of High Level Hardware Limited, Orion super-minicomputers at Kent University, U.K.
context_page_description: The Orion was a series of 32-bit super-minicomputers designed and produced in the 1980s by High Level Hardware Limited, a company based in Oxford, UK. The company produced four versions of the machine:
  The original Orion, sometimes referred to as the "Microcodeable Orion".
  The Orion 1/05, in which the microcodeable CPU was replaced with the much faster Fairchild Clipper RISC C-100 processor providing approximately 5.5 MIPS of integer performance and 1 Mflop of double precision floating point performance.
  The Orion 1/07 which offered approximately 33% greater performance over the 1/05.
  The Orion 1/10 based on a later generation C-300 Clipper from the Advanced Processor Division at Intergraph Corporation that required extensive cooling. The Orion 1/10 offered a further 30% improvement for integer and single precision floating point operations and over 150% improvement for double precision floating point.
  All four machines employed the same I/O sub-system.
context_section_description: The operating system for the microcodable Orion was OTS (Orion Time Sharing) version 1.x, a port of the 4.1BSD UNIX operating system.
  The Clipper-powered Orions ran OTS version 2.x, a port of the 4.2BSD UNIX with some additions. This was not notably reliable or secure, and had a tendency to 'forget' process user IDs, randomly leaving user processes running as root.
  HLH also produced a graphics terminal for the Orion called the StarPoint, to which they ported the X Window System.
  The Orion series was moderately popular with the computer science departments of British universities, including Westfield College, London, Bath, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Kent, Southampton, Warwick, York, King's College, London. A typical multi-user Orion configuration would have had 8 MB of RAM,  an SMD hard disk (e.g. a 168 MB Kennedy  or a  434 MB Fujitsu Eagle), a 60 MB QIC-24 tape drive and 8 to 32 RS-232 terminal ports.
caption: HLH Orions at the University of Kent
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